Critter Encounters

I. Love. Hummingbirds. We were blessed in Arizona to have a lot of them around our house; to see brightly-colored ones (like the one above) darting in and out of bushes all around us in Brazil was fantastic. In addition to these fast little gems, there were birds of all shapes and hues there. Unfortunately, most of them chose the moment that I got my camera focused to fly away, but here are some of the beautiful birds that we saw. We hoped to catch sight of something exotic like a macaw, but they turned out to be elusive.

In addition to all of the pictures we’ve shared in prior posts of monkeys and dolphins and butterflies, we had encounters with other amazing creatures in Brazil – huge spiders, crabs hanging out on docks (angry crabs according to Katie) and fish hanging out underneath, and moths the size of small birds.

Walking back from the waterfalls in Frade, we happened upon a group of capybaras – when they’re called the world’s largest rodents, that’s no joke. They are huge! Information we read afterward said that they can get up to 130cm (4 feet) in length and from 35-70kg (75-150 pounds). These capybaras fit right into that size estimate. They were grazing peacefully, some of them in the water, and although they were definitely aware of our presence, they didn’t seem to object and allowed us to get a pretty close up look at them.